Electrical connectors for flat ribbon cables are operative to provide a mass termination of the signal wires of a flat ribbon cable. Typically, adjacent pairs of the conductor wires of the flat ribbon cable are terminated by connecting individual ones of the conductors of successive pairs respectively to an I/O contact and to ground for removing electrical crosstalk, among other things. In the connector of U.S. Pat. No. 4,095,862, incorporated herein by reference, a connector housing halfshell is provided having a first row of upstanding, electrically isolated, longitudinally spaced apart signal contacts electrically connected to a corresponding I/O contact. Individual ones of the signal contacts are aligned to receive alternate conductor wires of the flat ribbon cable for termination thereof to a corresponding I/O contact. A bus bar is transversely positioned in the housing halfshell in spaced apart relation to the first row of signal contacts. The bus bar has a second row of upstanding, electrically connected, and longitudinally spaced apart ground output contacts, and a third row of upstanding, electrically connected, and longitudinally spaced apart ground contacts. Individual ones of the third row of upstanding ground contacts are aligned to receive alternate ones of the remaining conductors of the successive pairs of the flat ribbon cable for termination of corresponding ones thereof to the ground bus.
Individual ones of the second row of upstanding ground output contacts are aligned with a different one of the signal contacts, and either are programmable to receive corresponding ones of the conductors for termination thereof to the ground bus and thereby selectively to provide at least one grounded I/O contact, or are programmable to an electrically inoperative condition. Prior to assembling the connector, the bus bar is preferably inserted into a die programmed not to remove those ground output contacts which correspond to the selected I/O coupling elements to be grounded, while the non-selected ground output contacts are removed from the bus entirely. The programmed bus bar is thereafter mounted in the connector housing with the second row of upstanding ground output contacts positioned interiorly of the row of upstanding ground contacts providing a connector having standardized bus bar programming. However, in many applications, it is often desirable to have at the ground potential an I/O coupling element that does not correspond to the commercially available pre-programmed I/O coupling elements. In these instances, a special order is required necessitating costly time delays, tooling, and handling.